A small Brooklyn startup is quietly building out a roster of publishing partners and paying advertisers that would be the envy of many in digital media.

Across the digital publishing spectrum, sites like Business Insider, Dailymail.com and Slate, along with major traditional media companies such as Time Inc., Conde Nast, Bonnier and The Washington Post are running "Avalanche" ads produced by the firm Velocity Made Good (VMG).

What's an Avalanche? And why are A-list brands such as Land Rover, Charles Schwab, Samsung, Verizon, Canon, Guinness, Porsche and BMW snatching them up?

The Avalanche product weaves an ad into a content carousel on a publisher's website. Think of a squared off section of a site highlighting several editorial stories with images--and one of these images is an ad. If a reader mouses over an Avalanche ad, the advertiser's image expands over the content hub.

The ads can fetch a higher price tag because they are tucked in among the publisher's own content and more likely to catch a reader's eye than an easily overlooked standard display ad. It comes a bit closer to mixing advertising with editorial without being intentionally deceptive.

Avalanche is the brainchild of VMG founder Chris Batty, who formerly worked in digital sales at Gawker Media and CNET. During those tenures, Mr. Batty said he saw how the display ad market was becoming commoditized. Publishers were on the lookout for better, more visual ad products but didn't want to constantly produce brand new custom treatments.

"That's the world where publishers live," he said. "In the world of brand advertising, everything is 'never been done before.' And there's all this investment in ad tech, but nobody is thinking about these systems for brands. So we thought we can help publishers take control of user experience and their own destiny."

Mr. Batty said that 230 Avalanche campaigns have been run to date. The company worked with just four publishers in 2013, and that number jumped to 30 last year.

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Vice is one of those publishers. The company liked the ads so much that Vice Media made a small investment in VMG.

"[The Avalanche] delineates between editorial and ads, but puts them in a package that is less jarring. That's important for sites with limited real estate," said Andrew Creighton, president at Vice. Vice has run 13 Avalanche campaigns so far.

VMG doesn't sell directly to advertisers. Rather, it licences publishers the technology to sell the ads on their own, typically as part of larger, more premium deals.

So, a site like CarandDriver.com may bring in a few hundred thousand dollars for a campaign, for instance, while VMG gets paid a small fee each time one of these ads appears on the publisher’s site, which can add up to $4,000 or $5,000 per campaign, said a person familiar with the matter. VMG is profitable, and its revenue is trending toward a few million dollars this year, the person said.

Ad sales executives say the Avalanche product helps meets some of their current needs. The ads work well on mobile devices. They blend high-impact creative with "native" ads by appearing within an editorial placement without being designed to decieve readers. They are inherently "viewable" during a time when many marketers are worried about paying for Web ads nobody can see.

"We were serving that across Men's group, and the product quickly caught on," said Felix DiFilippo, publisher and chief revenue officer at Hearst Magazines' Car & Driver and Road & Track. "It's become a big difference maker. And the fact that it's touch-screen enabled, the engagement numbers are through the roof."

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Emily Evans-Allen, senior vice president of sales development at Business Insider, said the Avalanche offering works particularly well for brands looking to promote their own content. "It's in every single proposal for a branded content deal," she said. "This is the unit."

But the Avalanche product also appeals to brands who just want to make sure more people actually see their ad images. "This works in the fight against that and banner blindness," said Tim Mosback, partner and vice president for integrated investment at the agency UM. "Also, what sold me was the cool factor. The ads look awesome."

Correction: This post originally listed Rolling Stone as an Avalanche customer. Rolling Stone’s parent company Wenner Media has run Avalanche ads on US Weekly’s website, but not on Rolling Stone’s Website.